June 29, 2022 • 22 mins
Abraham Lincoln is considered our greatest president — and one of the most controversial. People have debated various aspects of his personality and politics. Was he depressed? Was he truly opposed to slavery? Did the Union prevail because of his leadership, or despite him? This episode, led by noted Lincoln scholar Louis Masur, aims to uncover the man and not the myth.
Louis Masur is a Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. He received outstanding teaching awards from Rutgers, Trinity College, and the City College of New York, and won the Clive Prize for Excellence in Teaching from Harvard University.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I often ask this when I lecture on Lincoln. I
lecture on the Civil War. What if you go to
do research on the Civil War? What's the name? What's
the official name of the Civil And I got a
lot of studs here in the audience. I want one
of my past failed students who are in senior year.
A Science of Happiness, Appreciating Condern Painting, dilemmas of modern Medica,
Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, the artistic genius of
(00:23):
michel Angelo, when intuition, American Psychology of Religion, One Day University.
The most acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're
best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn
(00:52):
what's what's the name of the war? Yeah, I see,
you're all good. You're all good. It's the War of
the Rebellion if success. I'm Lou Majorum, Distinguished Professor of
American Studies in History at Rutgers University. I lecture on
Abraham Lincoln. What's fact and what's fiction? You're a rebel.
When I gave a lecture on Lincoln in Atlanta, they
all said, it's the War of Northern aggression. I said,
(01:13):
absolutely right, absolutely right, make no mistake about it. What
do we get wrong about him? Is there one thing
above others that we make a big mistake when we
think of Lincoln. Lincoln is is so complicated in so
many ways, and of course he's politicized. So when you
(01:34):
ask what do we get wrong about him? It depends
on on on your point of view. Right, the biggest
question has always been, of course, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln
and emancipation. The people who believe that he truly is
the great emancipator who freed the slaves, and the people
who cherry pick from other things that he said to
indicate that he was a racist who didn't really care
(01:56):
about slavery, who didn't free the slaves. So you start
there air and you can move into all kinds of
different questions because history is about interpretation. We we we
try to know the facts the best that we can,
but ultimately it's our job to turn facts into truths.
And so the truths of Lincoln, Uh, you're gonna have
(02:18):
different people disagreeing upon. Take, for example, the issue of
Lincoln and slavery. Lincoln was always against slavery, he said
I'm naturally anti slavery. I can't recall a place at
a time when I did not think and feel so.
But he wasn't always an abolitionist. He wasn't always committed
to freeing the slaves. So the question then becomes when
you ask what's fact and what's fiction? Well, was he
(02:42):
against slavery? Was he not against slavery? Did he free
the slaves? Did he not free the slaves? A lot
depends on how you frame the question, the answer that
one gets. He had a very different policy view on
slavery when he started as president, then a couple of
years later he's always against slavery, but he can't act
(03:05):
against slavery when he becomes president, even if he wanted to.
Slavery is a state institution protected by state laws. The
federal government has no power of slavery, and if you're
a Southern Unionist who owned slaves, you're still entitled to
your property. He has two generals early in the war,
(03:25):
General Hunter and General Fremont, who issue military orders freeing
the slaves in their areas. And what does Lincoln do.
He immediately revokes those orders, and people go apoplectic. Those
on the left, I mean the anti slavery abolitionists crowd.
Lincoln says, if there is a power to act against slavery,
it is vested in me as commander in chief, and
(03:46):
not in any of my generals. This is the thing
about Lincoln. This is where people get so confused on
the subject of Lincoln and slavery. Why couldn't the act
against slavery He didn't have the power to do so.
Lincoln time and again said that I cannot act against slavery.
I will not act against slavery. He said it leading
up to the Civil War to try and reassure those
Southern states that they had nothing to worry about with
(04:10):
him being elected president. They didn't believe that. In eleven
of them succeeded. But he does not cannot even if
he wanted to abolish slavery at the beginning of the war.
So the question then becomes, how do we get from
March of eighteen sixty one, when he says I can't
do anything against slavery to January one, eighteen sixty three,
(04:32):
when he issues an emancipation proclamation freeing the slaves. That
is the story of Lincoln and slavery. How radical was
the Emancipation Proclamation. Frederick Douglas, the great abolitionist, said the
Emancipation Proclamation stood next to the Decoration of Independence as
(04:55):
one of the two pole stars of liberty in America
at the time. P but recognized it to be the
most significant document since the Declaration. It has lost some
of its luster over time. That's another subject, perhaps, and
another story about reputation, about how the past gets viewed
through the prism of the present. But to think that
(05:18):
in a nation that had embraced slavery, he issued a
document that freed the majority of slaves is remarkable. What
a lot of people don't understand about the document is
it does something else that's even more radical. It authorizes
the enlistment of black soldiers in the U. S. Army.
(05:41):
Think about that, We're not only going to free the slaves,
We're going to put guns in their hands and send
them back South to fight for the Union. So it
was a one two punch that was profound, and at
the moment seemed that it would shift the balance of
the war. The question should be not what took them
so long to do it, but how unbelievable it is
(06:04):
that he did and he did it gradually, as was
his want. So Lincoln takes these steps, and he does
so under the doctrine of military necessity. And you can
watch again, it's an intellectual problem, as much of his is.
It's any other kind of problem. Okay, how do we
(06:26):
get from it's illegal down constitutional free to slaves too?
I have the legal, constitutional right to do so. And
the answer is as a as a necessary means of war,
as a way to promote the military effort. Now, the
slaves themselves are not all quite impassive in all of this. Right,
the enslaved runaway delivered themselves to Union lines and also
(06:47):
forced Lincoln to consider this. He says in July, the
pressure upon me in this direction is great, Lincoln. I so,
you know. So it's not just that Lincoln acts. Lincoln reacts.
The famous line of Lincoln's that I cannot claim to
have controlled events, but I have been controlled by them.
How did Lincoln's views about the slaves change over the
(07:11):
years of his presidency. Well, if you think about the
problem of race in America, race and the question of
race continues to bedevil the nation in a variety of
different ways. Now, if you think back to the nineteenth century,
what are we going to do with these free blacks?
That literally was the question that was asked. If the
(07:33):
slaves are freed, what are we going to do with them?
The question is not always posed that way, but it
has to be posed that way because that's the way
in which they thought about the problem. For them, the
problem with slavery was not only yeah, slavery is wrong,
it's immoral, it's illegal, it's unconstitution We should abolish the slaves.
But then there's a second question. Four million formally enslaved
(07:54):
persons now free, what are we gonna do? And a
lot of that is to understand the racialist ideology of
the day, which varies in terms of where you want
to go on the spectrum of quote unquote racism. You know,
there's actually a paternalistic, benevolent racism and it goes like this.
And this isn't to justify it. But if we're gonna
be historians, we have to think the way in which
(08:16):
the nineteenth century thought and not necessarily impose some of
our own ideas upon them. Well, if you thought slavery
was such a total institution of barbaric, horrible damage, institution
that deprived individuals of any idea of humanity, then any
theory of personality means you have one of two types
coming out of it. Either the enslaved are made to
(08:37):
be so docile and childlike and infantilize that they can
possibly function for themselves and take on the responsibilities of adulthood.
Or they have been made so savage, so barbarous that
the result is going to be bloodshed, that they're going
to exact revenge on their former masters. So what do
(08:58):
we do? And here's a classic example of Lincoln changing
his mind. Lincoln, like many Americans, believed they can't live
peaceably side by side with whites, so they believed in colonization.
You know we're gonna do. We're going to get them
voluntarily to emigrate out of the country. And Lincoln supported this. Indeed,
(09:18):
he was a sucker for every colonization scheme that came
his way because he believed that this was a solution
to what we might call the race problem in America.
African Americans didn't want that. Black said, no, we're Americans.
We don't want to go to Liberia. That's one of
the first countries founded as a colony for former blacks
in America. We want to stay. And over time Lincoln
(09:41):
comes to understand that that's right, that that not only
should slavery be ended, but we must find the way
for the black citizens of America to obtain their full
rights as citizens within this country. He goes so far
as to not only abandoned colonization, but in the very
(10:03):
last speech that he gives on April eleventh, eighteen sixty five,
he endorses black suffrage. We're talking about the evolution of
Abraham Lincoln as president and commander in chief. So in
that last speech, among other things, he says that he
supports black suffrage for educated blacks and those who served.
(10:25):
Think about that. Shockingly, the right to vote today is
still contested. Think about what it meant to give the
vote to black men in eighteen sixty but Lincoln was
prepared to do so. This is a man who eleven
years earlier didn't even know they deserve political and social equality.
John Wokes Booth is among the crowd who hears Lincoln
(10:47):
deliver that speech, and he turns to his co conspirator,
Louis Pale, and he says, that's the last speech he'll
ever give. And we don't often think of Lincoln as
a martyr to civil rights, but to the stent that
while the conspiracy was in motion, it's that speech and
the endorsement of black suffrage that immediately led Booth three
(11:09):
days later to assassinate Lincoln. That's important to remember. So
we have this man, Abraham Lincoln, who starts out, I'm
not so sure about whites and blacks being equal, certainly
not certain that blacks should live in this country, against slavery,
but not willing really to act against slavery. Doesn't have
(11:30):
the power to do it. And where do we end up.
We end up with this man who not only frees
the slaves, but he believes that you have to give
black men the right to vote so that they could
be full citizens of the nation. That's greatness. There's a
lovely moment in your lecture when you talk about Lincoln
growing a beard. It's fabulous story. It's one of the
(11:53):
many great Lincoln stories. He he grows it in response
to a letter that he gets after he was elected.
Around the time of his election, what did he do
he grew here? He seems to do so in response
to a letter that he gets from an eleven year
old girl named Grace Biddell Grace writes them a letter
(12:17):
in October eighteen sixty and says, I've got four brothers,
and part of them will vote for you anyway. If
you will let your whiskers grow and I will try
and get the rest of them to vote for you,
you would look a great deal better. For your face
is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, and they
(12:38):
would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then
you would be president. My father is going to vote
for you, and if I was a man, I would
vote for you too. But I will try and get
everyone to vote for you that I can. Remarkable letter
from an eleven year old girl, and it's just beautiful.
Of course, it captures some other fundamental truth about Lincoln.
(13:00):
And that's how weird looking he was for the times.
He was awkward. He was downright ugly, and he knew it.
He's constantly making references to his appearance. Anyone who ever
saw Lincoln jotted something down about how he looks. What Whitman,
the great poet, was working in Armory Hospital, he used
to see Lincoln coming and going. He writes a letter
(13:22):
to his mother where he says, I see the president
every day. He is like a who'sier Michaelangelo? So awful, ugly,
he's almost beautiful. So and now here you have this
eleven year old girl also saying, you know, I think
you look better with a beard. What's remarkable because Lincoln responds,
and he responds as if she's a constituent, and he
(13:43):
he says, thank you for your consideration, and indeed he
goes ahead and grows the beard. I also argue in
my lecture that the beard is in effect also his
war beard. It's grown between his election and his inauguration.
He's preparing for the cataclysmic conflict that seems to be
(14:04):
coming on the horizon. Did he, above most other men
of his time feel deeply about the importance of preserving
the Union? Right from the get go, preserving the Union
was everything to Lincoln. Time and again he talked about
the Union. He in fact creates in some ways the
(14:26):
cult of Union. In his inaugural address, he talks about
the perpetuity of the Union. He countered every chance he
could the argument being made by the secessionists that it's
the states that had ultimate authority. No, no, no, no,
Lincoln said, the federal government, the Union that's what had
(14:46):
ultimate authority, and that no one had a right to
leave the union. You could do all kinds of things.
If you're unhappy with the election of the president, you
can wait four years and vote amount of office. You
can try and organize a constitutional convention to change the
frame of government. There are many things that you could do.
(15:07):
What you can't do is leave. Lincoln articulates this critical
legal constitutional doctrine of the illegality of secession. That's what
he's spending his time doing. Is, of course a lawyer.
He's done a tremendous amount of research. He argues that
secession is an ingenious saphis m. Those are his words.
(15:28):
He says, it is the essence of anarchy. You cannot
have a government in which there's a constitutional right to secession.
Lincoln said, nonsense. The compact theory of government does not
mean states take precedence over the federal government. Cannot be done.
The nation exists before the state. And there are many
parts of Lincoln's greatness. Part of course, of his greatness
(15:51):
is his ability to argue and sustain an argument for
the nation the union in predominance over the state, and
his defense of the union. His articulation of that is
one of the great contributions to our history. That's the
meeting of the Gettysburg Address four score and seven years ago.
Our fathers came forth to create a new nation. That
(16:15):
word nation. The address is a little over two words.
He uses the word nation five times. That's what Lincoln
believed in, right, those mystic chords of memory that he
spoke about, and that's what he defended, and that's ultimately
what he preserved. His refusal to allow the Union to
be lost is what kept this country together. Do you
(16:37):
think that without Lincoln the United States would have split
apart and remained split in a much more fundamental way
than it is today. Counter Factuals and hypotheticals are always
difficult for historians to answer. Are generally we try to
avoid answering them because you just can never know. But
I think there's a strong likelihood, with out Lincoln's leadership,
(17:01):
his determination, his skills, and a lot of luck, that
indeed the strength of states rights, the strength of secession
may very well have led to the fracturing and breaking
up of this nation into into two nations or more.
It's worth noting that those questions are still alive right there.
(17:21):
You know, the state of California today is threatening to
succeed in California is one of the world's largest economies.
Are questions of states rights haven't gone away? Although I
do think the commonplaces to say this. Before the Civil War,
the United States was plural. After the Civil War, it's singular.
Lincoln was one of the driving forces to help make that.
(17:44):
So you said that the greatest thing about Abraham Lincoln
may well have been that he changed his mind. Why
is that so important? You know? I tend to try
not to talk about as it matters when I lecture
about the past. But I think we need only look
around at the state of politics today on all sides
(18:08):
of the political spectrum. This is a nonpartisan comment about
the rigidity, about the ways in which positions become ossified,
about the ways in which it seems that discourse is
limited and people refuse to move in any direction. For me,
it makes my admiration of Lincoln all the greater. How
(18:30):
did this man born in poverty, self educated? How did
he come to represent this ability and this willingness to
think through things and to change his mind over time?
I'll give you two diametrically opposed quotes from Lincoln to
show you how he changed his mind during the war.
(18:52):
August Lincoln told delegates from Indiana, who offered to raise
two black regiments, quote, the nation couldnt afford to lose
Kentucky at this crisis, and to arm the Negroes would
turn fifty thousand bayonets from the loyal border states against
US that were for US. August two. Not doing it.
(19:16):
Here we go January one, weeks after. The colored population
is the great available and yet unavailable force for restoring
the Union. The bare site of fifty thousand armed and
drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would
end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we
(19:37):
could present that site if we but take hold of
it in earnest? Is that wonderful? I think ultimately that's
the measure of a great political leader, change over time.
It is a remarkable phenomenon to study and to witness.
And I'm not alone in doing that, you know, I
often in my lecture quote W. E. B. Du Bois,
(19:57):
the great African American IT or historian activists, founder the
Double A CP. The boys thought a lot about Lincoln
at the time of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial,
and one of the things that he said about him,
he said, I love him not because he was perfect,
(20:17):
but because he wasn't, and yet he triumphed. That's the
thing about Lincoln. We could see all the ways in
which he wasn't perfect. We could see all the ways
in which he was a bundle of contradictions. We can
see all the ways in which he struggled in his
own time. But in the end he triumphed, and because
(20:39):
of his triumph, this nation continues. What do you hope
that audiences will take away from this lecture? My deepest
hope for what audiences will take away from this lecture
is to understand that all of us today can still
(21:04):
become some better version of ourselves, because I think the
genius of Lincoln is that he was always becoming, He
was always changing. He didn't start out as Abraham Lincoln.
He became Abraham Lincoln. And what that means is any
of us can also become the thing that we most
(21:27):
hope we want to be. So in that sense, to
see Lincoln, yes, it's to understand the past, is to
understand a seminal figure without whom this nation would be
fundamentally different. But the best of history also allows us
to understand something about ourselves. I'm Richard Davis. Thanks for listening.
(21:55):
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I often ask this when I lecture on Lincoln. I
lecture on the Civil War. What if you go to
do research on the Civil War? What's the name? What's
the official name of the Civil And I got a
lot of studs here in the audience. I want one
of my past failed students who are in senior year.
A Science of Happiness, Appreciating Condern Painting, dilemmas of modern Medica,
Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, the artistic genius of
(00:23):
michel Angelo, when intuition, American Psychology of Religion, One Day University.
The most acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're
best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn
(00:52):
what's what's the name of the war? Yeah, I see,
you're all good. You're all good. It's the War of
the Rebellion if success. I'm Lou Majorum, Distinguished Professor of
American Studies in History at Rutgers University. I lecture on
Abraham Lincoln. What's fact and what's fiction? You're a rebel.
When I gave a lecture on Lincoln in Atlanta, they
all said, it's the War of Northern aggression. I said,
(01:13):
absolutely right, absolutely right, make no mistake about it. What
do we get wrong about him? Is there one thing
above others that we make a big mistake when we
think of Lincoln. Lincoln is is so complicated in so
many ways, and of course he's politicized. So when you
(01:34):
ask what do we get wrong about him? It depends
on on on your point of view. Right, the biggest
question has always been, of course, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln
and emancipation. The people who believe that he truly is
the great emancipator who freed the slaves, and the people
who cherry pick from other things that he said to
indicate that he was a racist who didn't really care
(01:56):
about slavery, who didn't free the slaves. So you start
there air and you can move into all kinds of
different questions because history is about interpretation. We we we
try to know the facts the best that we can,
but ultimately it's our job to turn facts into truths.
And so the truths of Lincoln, Uh, you're gonna have
(02:18):
different people disagreeing upon. Take, for example, the issue of
Lincoln and slavery. Lincoln was always against slavery, he said
I'm naturally anti slavery. I can't recall a place at
a time when I did not think and feel so.
But he wasn't always an abolitionist. He wasn't always committed
to freeing the slaves. So the question then becomes when
you ask what's fact and what's fiction? Well, was he
(02:42):
against slavery? Was he not against slavery? Did he free
the slaves? Did he not free the slaves? A lot
depends on how you frame the question, the answer that
one gets. He had a very different policy view on
slavery when he started as president, then a couple of
years later he's always against slavery, but he can't act
(03:05):
against slavery when he becomes president, even if he wanted to.
Slavery is a state institution protected by state laws. The
federal government has no power of slavery, and if you're
a Southern Unionist who owned slaves, you're still entitled to
your property. He has two generals early in the war,
(03:25):
General Hunter and General Fremont, who issue military orders freeing
the slaves in their areas. And what does Lincoln do.
He immediately revokes those orders, and people go apoplectic. Those
on the left, I mean the anti slavery abolitionists crowd.
Lincoln says, if there is a power to act against slavery,
it is vested in me as commander in chief, and
(03:46):
not in any of my generals. This is the thing
about Lincoln. This is where people get so confused on
the subject of Lincoln and slavery. Why couldn't the act
against slavery He didn't have the power to do so.
Lincoln time and again said that I cannot act against slavery.
I will not act against slavery. He said it leading
up to the Civil War to try and reassure those
Southern states that they had nothing to worry about with
(04:10):
him being elected president. They didn't believe that. In eleven
of them succeeded. But he does not cannot even if
he wanted to abolish slavery at the beginning of the war.
So the question then becomes, how do we get from
March of eighteen sixty one, when he says I can't
do anything against slavery to January one, eighteen sixty three,
(04:32):
when he issues an emancipation proclamation freeing the slaves. That
is the story of Lincoln and slavery. How radical was
the Emancipation Proclamation. Frederick Douglas, the great abolitionist, said the
Emancipation Proclamation stood next to the Decoration of Independence as
(04:55):
one of the two pole stars of liberty in America
at the time. P but recognized it to be the
most significant document since the Declaration. It has lost some
of its luster over time. That's another subject, perhaps, and
another story about reputation, about how the past gets viewed
through the prism of the present. But to think that
(05:18):
in a nation that had embraced slavery, he issued a
document that freed the majority of slaves is remarkable. What
a lot of people don't understand about the document is
it does something else that's even more radical. It authorizes
the enlistment of black soldiers in the U. S. Army.
(05:41):
Think about that, We're not only going to free the slaves,
We're going to put guns in their hands and send
them back South to fight for the Union. So it
was a one two punch that was profound, and at
the moment seemed that it would shift the balance of
the war. The question should be not what took them
so long to do it, but how unbelievable it is
(06:04):
that he did and he did it gradually, as was
his want. So Lincoln takes these steps, and he does
so under the doctrine of military necessity. And you can
watch again, it's an intellectual problem, as much of his is.
It's any other kind of problem. Okay, how do we
(06:26):
get from it's illegal down constitutional free to slaves too?
I have the legal, constitutional right to do so. And
the answer is as a as a necessary means of war,
as a way to promote the military effort. Now, the
slaves themselves are not all quite impassive in all of this. Right,
the enslaved runaway delivered themselves to Union lines and also
(06:47):
forced Lincoln to consider this. He says in July, the
pressure upon me in this direction is great, Lincoln. I so,
you know. So it's not just that Lincoln acts. Lincoln reacts.
The famous line of Lincoln's that I cannot claim to
have controlled events, but I have been controlled by them.
How did Lincoln's views about the slaves change over the
(07:11):
years of his presidency. Well, if you think about the
problem of race in America, race and the question of
race continues to bedevil the nation in a variety of
different ways. Now, if you think back to the nineteenth century,
what are we going to do with these free blacks?
That literally was the question that was asked. If the
(07:33):
slaves are freed, what are we going to do with them?
The question is not always posed that way, but it
has to be posed that way because that's the way
in which they thought about the problem. For them, the
problem with slavery was not only yeah, slavery is wrong,
it's immoral, it's illegal, it's unconstitution We should abolish the slaves.
But then there's a second question. Four million formally enslaved
(07:54):
persons now free, what are we gonna do? And a
lot of that is to understand the racialist ideology of
the day, which varies in terms of where you want
to go on the spectrum of quote unquote racism. You know,
there's actually a paternalistic, benevolent racism and it goes like this.
And this isn't to justify it. But if we're gonna
be historians, we have to think the way in which
(08:16):
the nineteenth century thought and not necessarily impose some of
our own ideas upon them. Well, if you thought slavery
was such a total institution of barbaric, horrible damage, institution
that deprived individuals of any idea of humanity, then any
theory of personality means you have one of two types
coming out of it. Either the enslaved are made to
(08:37):
be so docile and childlike and infantilize that they can
possibly function for themselves and take on the responsibilities of adulthood.
Or they have been made so savage, so barbarous that
the result is going to be bloodshed, that they're going
to exact revenge on their former masters. So what do
(08:58):
we do? And here's a classic example of Lincoln changing
his mind. Lincoln, like many Americans, believed they can't live
peaceably side by side with whites, so they believed in colonization.
You know we're gonna do. We're going to get them
voluntarily to emigrate out of the country. And Lincoln supported this. Indeed,
(09:18):
he was a sucker for every colonization scheme that came
his way because he believed that this was a solution
to what we might call the race problem in America.
African Americans didn't want that. Black said, no, we're Americans.
We don't want to go to Liberia. That's one of
the first countries founded as a colony for former blacks
in America. We want to stay. And over time Lincoln
(09:41):
comes to understand that that's right, that that not only
should slavery be ended, but we must find the way
for the black citizens of America to obtain their full
rights as citizens within this country. He goes so far
as to not only abandoned colonization, but in the very
(10:03):
last speech that he gives on April eleventh, eighteen sixty five,
he endorses black suffrage. We're talking about the evolution of
Abraham Lincoln as president and commander in chief. So in
that last speech, among other things, he says that he
supports black suffrage for educated blacks and those who served.
(10:25):
Think about that. Shockingly, the right to vote today is
still contested. Think about what it meant to give the
vote to black men in eighteen sixty but Lincoln was
prepared to do so. This is a man who eleven
years earlier didn't even know they deserve political and social equality.
John Wokes Booth is among the crowd who hears Lincoln
(10:47):
deliver that speech, and he turns to his co conspirator,
Louis Pale, and he says, that's the last speech he'll
ever give. And we don't often think of Lincoln as
a martyr to civil rights, but to the stent that
while the conspiracy was in motion, it's that speech and
the endorsement of black suffrage that immediately led Booth three
(11:09):
days later to assassinate Lincoln. That's important to remember. So
we have this man, Abraham Lincoln, who starts out, I'm
not so sure about whites and blacks being equal, certainly
not certain that blacks should live in this country, against slavery,
but not willing really to act against slavery. Doesn't have
(11:30):
the power to do it. And where do we end up.
We end up with this man who not only frees
the slaves, but he believes that you have to give
black men the right to vote so that they could
be full citizens of the nation. That's greatness. There's a
lovely moment in your lecture when you talk about Lincoln
growing a beard. It's fabulous story. It's one of the
(11:53):
many great Lincoln stories. He he grows it in response
to a letter that he gets after he was elected.
Around the time of his election, what did he do
he grew here? He seems to do so in response
to a letter that he gets from an eleven year
old girl named Grace Biddell Grace writes them a letter
(12:17):
in October eighteen sixty and says, I've got four brothers,
and part of them will vote for you anyway. If
you will let your whiskers grow and I will try
and get the rest of them to vote for you,
you would look a great deal better. For your face
is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, and they
(12:38):
would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then
you would be president. My father is going to vote
for you, and if I was a man, I would
vote for you too. But I will try and get
everyone to vote for you that I can. Remarkable letter
from an eleven year old girl, and it's just beautiful.
Of course, it captures some other fundamental truth about Lincoln.
(13:00):
And that's how weird looking he was for the times.
He was awkward. He was downright ugly, and he knew it.
He's constantly making references to his appearance. Anyone who ever
saw Lincoln jotted something down about how he looks. What Whitman,
the great poet, was working in Armory Hospital, he used
to see Lincoln coming and going. He writes a letter
(13:22):
to his mother where he says, I see the president
every day. He is like a who'sier Michaelangelo? So awful, ugly,
he's almost beautiful. So and now here you have this
eleven year old girl also saying, you know, I think
you look better with a beard. What's remarkable because Lincoln responds,
and he responds as if she's a constituent, and he
(13:43):
he says, thank you for your consideration, and indeed he
goes ahead and grows the beard. I also argue in
my lecture that the beard is in effect also his
war beard. It's grown between his election and his inauguration.
He's preparing for the cataclysmic conflict that seems to be
(14:04):
coming on the horizon. Did he, above most other men
of his time feel deeply about the importance of preserving
the Union? Right from the get go, preserving the Union
was everything to Lincoln. Time and again he talked about
the Union. He in fact creates in some ways the
(14:26):
cult of Union. In his inaugural address, he talks about
the perpetuity of the Union. He countered every chance he
could the argument being made by the secessionists that it's
the states that had ultimate authority. No, no, no, no,
Lincoln said, the federal government, the Union that's what had
(14:46):
ultimate authority, and that no one had a right to
leave the union. You could do all kinds of things.
If you're unhappy with the election of the president, you
can wait four years and vote amount of office. You
can try and organize a constitutional convention to change the
frame of government. There are many things that you could do.
(15:07):
What you can't do is leave. Lincoln articulates this critical
legal constitutional doctrine of the illegality of secession. That's what
he's spending his time doing. Is, of course a lawyer.
He's done a tremendous amount of research. He argues that
secession is an ingenious saphis m. Those are his words.
(15:28):
He says, it is the essence of anarchy. You cannot
have a government in which there's a constitutional right to secession.
Lincoln said, nonsense. The compact theory of government does not
mean states take precedence over the federal government. Cannot be done.
The nation exists before the state. And there are many
parts of Lincoln's greatness. Part of course, of his greatness
(15:51):
is his ability to argue and sustain an argument for
the nation the union in predominance over the state, and
his defense of the union. His articulation of that is
one of the great contributions to our history. That's the
meeting of the Gettysburg Address four score and seven years ago.
Our fathers came forth to create a new nation. That
(16:15):
word nation. The address is a little over two words.
He uses the word nation five times. That's what Lincoln
believed in, right, those mystic chords of memory that he
spoke about, and that's what he defended, and that's ultimately
what he preserved. His refusal to allow the Union to
be lost is what kept this country together. Do you
(16:37):
think that without Lincoln the United States would have split
apart and remained split in a much more fundamental way
than it is today. Counter Factuals and hypotheticals are always
difficult for historians to answer. Are generally we try to
avoid answering them because you just can never know. But
I think there's a strong likelihood, with out Lincoln's leadership,
(17:01):
his determination, his skills, and a lot of luck, that
indeed the strength of states rights, the strength of secession
may very well have led to the fracturing and breaking
up of this nation into into two nations or more.
It's worth noting that those questions are still alive right there.
(17:21):
You know, the state of California today is threatening to
succeed in California is one of the world's largest economies.
Are questions of states rights haven't gone away? Although I
do think the commonplaces to say this. Before the Civil War,
the United States was plural. After the Civil War, it's singular.
Lincoln was one of the driving forces to help make that.
(17:44):
So you said that the greatest thing about Abraham Lincoln
may well have been that he changed his mind. Why
is that so important? You know? I tend to try
not to talk about as it matters when I lecture
about the past. But I think we need only look
around at the state of politics today on all sides
(18:08):
of the political spectrum. This is a nonpartisan comment about
the rigidity, about the ways in which positions become ossified,
about the ways in which it seems that discourse is
limited and people refuse to move in any direction. For me,
it makes my admiration of Lincoln all the greater. How
(18:30):
did this man born in poverty, self educated? How did
he come to represent this ability and this willingness to
think through things and to change his mind over time?
I'll give you two diametrically opposed quotes from Lincoln to
show you how he changed his mind during the war.
(18:52):
August Lincoln told delegates from Indiana, who offered to raise
two black regiments, quote, the nation couldnt afford to lose
Kentucky at this crisis, and to arm the Negroes would
turn fifty thousand bayonets from the loyal border states against
US that were for US. August two. Not doing it.
(19:16):
Here we go January one, weeks after. The colored population
is the great available and yet unavailable force for restoring
the Union. The bare site of fifty thousand armed and
drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would
end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we
(19:37):
could present that site if we but take hold of
it in earnest? Is that wonderful? I think ultimately that's
the measure of a great political leader, change over time.
It is a remarkable phenomenon to study and to witness.
And I'm not alone in doing that, you know, I
often in my lecture quote W. E. B. Du Bois,
(19:57):
the great African American IT or historian activists, founder the
Double A CP. The boys thought a lot about Lincoln
at the time of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial,
and one of the things that he said about him,
he said, I love him not because he was perfect,
(20:17):
but because he wasn't, and yet he triumphed. That's the
thing about Lincoln. We could see all the ways in
which he wasn't perfect. We could see all the ways
in which he was a bundle of contradictions. We can
see all the ways in which he struggled in his
own time. But in the end he triumphed, and because
(20:39):
of his triumph, this nation continues. What do you hope
that audiences will take away from this lecture? My deepest
hope for what audiences will take away from this lecture
is to understand that all of us today can still
(21:04):
become some better version of ourselves, because I think the
genius of Lincoln is that he was always becoming, He
was always changing. He didn't start out as Abraham Lincoln.
He became Abraham Lincoln. And what that means is any
of us can also become the thing that we most
(21:27):
hope we want to be. So in that sense, to
see Lincoln, yes, it's to understand the past, is to
understand a seminal figure without whom this nation would be
fundamentally different. But the best of history also allows us
to understand something about ourselves. I'm Richard Davis. Thanks for listening.
(21:55):
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